“Not really,” Isabel says. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather be at Bergdorf’s.”
This provokes nervous laughter from her sister and her mother. “Let’s just get this over with, girls,” Elizabeth says.
They approach Teddy’s door, and she knocks crisply. Then remembers there’s a buzzer, and presses that, too.
There’s no answer. She buzzes again. But then she hears something inside, almost like . . . she can’t quite place it, it’s like a rattling of bamboo poles, but that’s not it, not exactly. Turning to her daughters, Elizabeth says, “You hear that sound?”
“Yeah,” Kate says. “Weird.”
And then without really knowing she’s doing it, Elizabeth puts the key in the door. Before opening it to Teddy’s perfectly appointed apartment, the gilt frames of the paintings, the porcelain objects, the walls covered in honey-colored rice wallpaper, much of the furniture brightly painted in an offbeat Venetian style, she imagines Teddy himself lying on his living room sofa and a matrix of deep red meandering lines staining the sofa. Soaked in his blood, the sofa itself would look like a veiny network of the inside of a body. Teddy’s eyes would be fully open, lighter and more opaque than their usual deep blue, and they’d have a faraway glint of some radically different place.
Oh, come on, she tells herself, don’t let your imagination run wild like that.
At last she opens the door. She calls out to him. She looks at the sofa, relieved to see that he’s not lying on it. Without a further word, the Chases check the apartment for signs of its owner. The rooms are spotlessly clean and look as though no one has been there for a while.
They ride the elevator down to the lobby without saying a word. Then, almost as if he knows they’ve just left his apartment, Teddy calls Elizabeth’s cell as she and her daughters are walking out of the building.
“Where have you been?” Elizabeth practically yells.
There’s a short silence. “Oh, God,” is all Teddy says.
“Are you drunk?”
“No, just . . . incredibly sleepy.”
Elizabeth makes eye contact with Kate and Isabel. “Teddy, where are you? You missed your walk-through and have been out of it for a day.”
He groans. “I know.”
“I had to go into your apartment—I’m so sorry. But I was quite panicked.”
“Thank you, Elizabeth. I’m . . . I was . . . sleeping.”
“What do you mean, you were sleeping?”
“Well . . . actually, I’m not home. I mean, I’m in a cab on my way home.”
“I know you’re not home, Teddy. The girls and I just came looking for you at your apartment.”
“Are you serious?” Teddy says. “You went to my apartment? I’m so—”
“Can you please just tell me what’s going on?”
He briefly explains that last night he’d gone to the apartment of a woman he’d been dating—gone there with the sole purpose of breaking up with her. He’d had a drink, and the next thing he knew, he was waking up at one in the afternoon. Completely alone.
“That’s very weird. Do you think she might have drugged you?” Elizabeth says.
“Slipped me one of those blackout drugs, you mean? I can’t say for sure, but I think it’s very possible. I’m completely confused. I’ve never slept like that before.”
“Well, I’d suggest you get yourself together and come to the office. Are you going to press charges against her?”
“I’m feeling okay. I’m not going to press any charges,” Teddy says. “I can’t take the chance that something like this could get into the press.” He’s referring to his high-profile life, which has been the subject of articles in all the major New York papers. “I just need to get home, take a shower, and change my clothes,” he continues. “I’ll see you soon, Elizabeth. And again, I’m really sorry. And thank you for handling the walk-through.”
“Unbelievable!” Elizabeth exclaims to Kate and Isabel when she gets off the phone.
“He thinks he was drugged?” Isabel says.
“Well, maybe he needs to use better judgment about the kinds of women he sleeps with,” Elizabeth says.
“Totally!” both of her daughters say in unison.
Elizabeth hears the phone ringing as she’s entering her own apartment. “Can you get that?” she yells to Tom. Her three treasured Maltese are at the door, jumping up on her and demanding attention. She hears Tom picking up the phone and listens to see who it is.
“She just walked in. Can you give her a minute?” she hears him saying.
“Who is it, Tom?”
“Somebody from Friends of Finn calling about the Humane Society gala at the Pierre,” he says, referring to the animal protection organization to which the whole family is very committed.
“Tell them I’ll call back in ten minutes.”
Elizabeth picks up Roxy, the most frantic of her Maltese, and, followed closely by the others, carries her just a few yards down the long hallway lined with nineteenth-century paintings of spaniels and hunting dogs to the library with its enormous flat-screen TV, where the whole family likes to gather to watch old movies together. The DVD of Bringing Up Baby—the romantic comedy that Elizabeth and Tom and the girls are planning to watch later that night—is already in the player. A colorful framed poster for the 1938 movie hangs on the wall in the library; it shows the cartoon figures of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant hovering over a leopard seated upright in a high chair. Elizabeth exhales an exhausted breath, sits down in her favorite buttery leather club chair, and kisses Roxy. Lola and Dolly paw her frantically, and she picks them up.
Tom comes into the room with a wary look on his face, his finely brushed silver hair lustrous, his face tanned from their previous weekend in Boca Raton, where they recently purchased a home at One Thousand Ocean from Jamie Telchin, head of the ownership group behind the luxury new condominiums adjacent to the Boca Beach Club. The Chases have been going to Boca Raton since Kate was in the eighth grade, and every time their car from the airport pulled up the long winding driveway to the sprawling pink Cloisters of the Boca Raton Hotel and Resort, their hearts fluttered. Years later, much to their delight, a condo was built at the very tip of the beach, nestled in the corner of the ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway, where the Chase family sat to sun themselves for fifteen years. They bought residence 307 (because both three and seven were lucky numbers for them), a four-bedroom that hangs over the ocean like an awning, with a private infinity pool and outdoor kitchen on the terrace and a two-car private garage.
Tom’s khaki pants and bone-white, button-down oxford shirt show off his tan now—he looks just like the young Robert Evans, Elizabeth thinks, particularly at this moment. “So what’s going on with Teddy?” he asks her.
“You won’t believe it. He was drugged . . . apparently by one of his girlfriends he’d just broken up with.”
“I don’t believe it. It sounds too ridiculous,” Tom says.
“I actually think he’s telling the truth, Tom. I don’t think he took drugs, I think something happened. Come on, you know how Teddy is. He’d never jeopardize something as important as a walk-through before a closing.”
“I guess you’re right,” Tom agrees. “He certainly seems to have an obsession with money.”
Elizabeth stands up, holding Roxy, puts the other two down, and lets the dog rest her head on her shoulder. “I’ve got to call Friends of Finn back.”
“They said something about the gala.”
“I know. They want me to find out if the girls would be interested in being on the committee,” Elizabeth says, and then, with another sigh, hands Roxy over to Tom so that she can see about getting the dogs’ dinner ready.
Chapter Four
Kate
Have It All
Candela white-glove building, Park Avenue 90s, 8 rooms, two bedrooms
plus library, 3-and-a-half baths, grand entrance gallery, huge chef’s EIK, elegant finishes throughout. $6.5 million.
It’s the one-week anniversary of her breakup with Scott, and the curtain has just fallen on the American Ballet Theatre’s production of The Sleeping Beauty at Lincoln Center. Kate claps vigorously as Princess Aurora and Prince Désiré take their well-deserved bows, but already she is dreading the dinner to follow at Shun Lee West. Not that she doesn’t like Chinese food—she loves it, in fact, especially Shun Lee’s wonton soup (no one makes it like they do anymore), their crispy shredded beef, their prawns with garlic and scallions, a small portion of which will ornament her plate an hour from now as her date, Charlie Marcus, sits beside her on a leather banquette and struggles to use his chopsticks correctly.
Charlie places his small, clammy hand over hers for an instant now just before the two of them rise from their very pricey orchestra seats and move toward the aisle and then to the exit of the auditorium. Kate doesn’t know what she was thinking when, in a moment of weakness (and perhaps desperation), she agreed to go on a date with Charlie—a neighbor whom she kept running into when she went to pick up her morning coffee at Juliano’s until finally he summoned the courage to ask her out. Sorry to say, Charlie Marcus is, frankly, what she and Isabel like to refer to as “drippy.” And drippy, in this case, means very decent looks (except for his thinning hair) but no sparkle, no smile, and the unfortunate habit of chattering incessantly about pretentious trivia that makes Kate just glaze over.
“So,” Charlie is saying a little while later as the maître d’ at Shun Lee West summons a waiter to seat them, “did you know that Tchaikovsky first staged The Sleeping Beauty as a tribute to France’s Louis the Fourteenth?” He pronounces this “Loo-iss” rather than “Loo-ee,” Kate notes with annoyance, and she shakes her head at him. Isn’t there anything he can do right? Apparently not—in a few minutes, when their dumplings in hot sauce arrive, he clenches his chopsticks in his fist like a weapon. Never mind that this Charlie Marcus has a B.A. from Dartmouth and a law degree from Harvard, he’s a drip, plain and simple. Kate gazes longingly at her phone next to her place setting, dying to call Isabel to tell her about this awful date of hers, and willing her phone to ring with some make-believe emergency she must tend to. Looking at Charlie Marcus, his thin dark hair barely concealing his scalp, his girlish hands splitting a dumpling apart, scooping out the pork filling, and pushing it to the rim of his plate, well, she misses Scott so keenly at this moment, she can’t quite believe how much it hurts. Oh, Scott.
What a jerk he’s been! She knows the best thing she can possibly do is turn her thoughts elsewhere, in this case to the banal droning of Charlie Marcus.
“Loo-iss the Fourteenth’s reign began in 1643, when he was just four years old, and lasted seventy-two years, the longest reign, I believe, of any monarch. Any European monarch,” he corrects himself. “And he was succeeded at his death by his great-grandson, who was five years old at the time. Isn’t that incredible?” Charlie says, helping himself to another dumpling.
“Fascinating,” Kate agrees. From a large table composed of a half dozen tables-for-two pushed together, a roar of laughter rises, and a crowd of men her age in sport coats and ties raise their glasses to toast someone named Kelly.
It occurs to her that maybe if she weren’t so in love with Scott, she might be able to give Charlie a chance; he is, after all, an extremely smart, accomplished young man, and yes, she concedes, nice-looking.
“Did I mention that when I was in law school, I took an adult ed cooking class where I learned how to debone a chicken?” he says. “First you remove the heart, liver, and neck, and then . . .”
Kate shudders. She wants to thank Charlie Marcus for the ballet, for the dumplings in hot sauce, then tell him she has a horrific headache and must get home immediately. But her mother and father have brought her up to treat people with decency, to always show that you have a good heart. And so, instead, she chokes back a gag, asks Charlie to stop talking about a dead chicken, and then pretends to listen carefully as he goes on and on and on about another cooking class he took, this one called “The Possibilities of Polenta.”
Later, before dessert arrives, she goes to the ladies’ room and calls Isabel, who, she knows, is spending the night at Michael’s. Kate’s so tempted to tell her sister where she is and why—that Scott broke up with her last week and that she can’t wait for this horrible date to be over. But as her sister’s phone is ringing, Kate realizes she can’t bear to hear Isabel’s sigh, and then for her to say that Scott is unbelievably immature, and totally undependable, and that he will continue to disappoint Kate and break her heart. And so Kate says, when she hears Isabel’s lively voice on the other end, that she has another call and will call her later.
Under the awning in front of her building, Charlie Marcus tries to put his tongue into her mouth; failing that, he tries her ear. “Please, don’t!” Kate tells him, pushing him away gently. She sweetens her voice. “Thank you so much for tonight,” she says, “but I’m just not ready for that.” And then she flees, past the doorman and into the elevator, wiping her ear with her fingertip and fighting back the urge, growing ever stronger, to call or e-mail Scott.
On her way into her bedroom, she stops to get a sour apple lollipop from the apothecary jar. Then she grabs a second. Candy is always a temporary antidote to an unfortunate situation, in this instance, an exceptionally disappointing date. She’s shocked that Charlie Marcus read her so wrong. The drip actually tried to kiss her—did he really think she’d given him any sign at all that she’d kiss him back? Oh, it was all so awful, she thinks.
Lounging on a mound of pillows in her bed, she watches an episode of Glee on TIVO; she loves those scenes with sweet Mr. Schuester and the divinely nasty Sue Sylvester. Watching them now, she remembers Matthew Morrison, the actor who plays Mr. Schue, singing “Younger Than Springtime” in South Pacific, a terrific production that she and her family saw at Lincoln Center several years ago. Her parents had taken her and her brother and sister to the theater for as long as she can remember, and, too, as children and teenagers they were treated to movies at the Paris Theater and under the stars at Bryant Park on Mondays in the summer, and to cabaret shows at the Carlyle and the Regency, where they’d seen all the greats, like Bobby Short, Eartha Kitt, and most recently Steve Tyrell. So many memories of her family, all five of them together. She doesn’t think anyone in the family would argue with her if she were to say that those were the best days of their lives, days like no other, Kate thinks.
Allison Silverman-Cole is one of Kate’s favorite clients, a speech pathologist with a successful solo practice, a wealthy girl lovely as could be, and a pleasure to do business with, except for one little issue—she’s highly allergic to avocados and a host of other things, including dust and paint. Kate and Allison had playdates together as far back as the 1980s, and though Allison attended Fieldston while Kate was at Horace Mann, they traveled in the same social circles all through high school, and never lost touch. Kate even remembers Allison’s fifth birthday party, when a clown and a scary-looking mime were hired to entertain the tiny guests; the mime so terrified Kate with his powdered white face and bloodred lips that her father had to be summoned to bring her home in the middle of the party. To this day, mimes and clowns still give her the shudders.
Just before she calls Allison to confirm their appointment to attend an open house at 1220 Park, Kate phones the listing broker from Stribling to ask a very important question. “Madylin?” she says into her cell as she hops into a cab. “Just checking to make sure the seller didn’t make a salad earlier in the day at the apartment. But if she did, do you happen to know if she sliced up an avocado in it?”
“Is this a joke?” Madylin says. “What kind of a question is that?”
“It sounds ridiculous, but my client has severe food allergies,” Kate says. “An avocado could send her into anaphyla
ctic shock.”
Madylin sighs. “Is this that client who’s allergic to every damn thing under the sun? Like I don’t have enough to worry about without having to know whether my client sliced up an avocado. And BTW, there’s going to be a nice catered lunch from Yura at the open house, no salad, no avocados, just sandwiches. So give me a break, Kate, will you?”
“Can you please call the seller? I’d really appreciate it. She’s seriously allergic.”
Accompanying Allison Silverman-Cole to the open house is a friend of hers, a grim-looking woman in a tennis dress and sneakers, an iced hazelnut coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts in a see-through plastic cup in her hand. Allison herself is wearing a jacket and an unbecoming pair of skin-tight jeggings (the hybrid jean and legging that started as a trend with the tween market and moved its way up) that cruelly emphasize her hips; oddly, a pale blue paper surgical mask is covering her mouth. She has gotten stranger as the years have passed, Kate thinks.
“Hiii!” Kate says, and gives Allison an air kiss, knowing how she feels about germs. “Everything okay?” She gestures toward the surgical mask, and notes that Allison’s friend is noisily sipping her coffee from a straw, barely giving Kate herself a glance.
“Just a precaution,” Allison says from behind her mask. “I know you told me there haven’t been any avocados sliced up here in the past few hours, but just in case.”
“Of course,” Kate says. “Oh, hi, I’m Kate,” she says to Allison’s friend.
“Jessica Prettyman,” the woman says. She takes one final, extra-loud sip of her coffee and hands the cup to Allison. “Is there a bathroom here I can use?”
It’s always a little awkward when a client needs to use a bathroom; why couldn’t Jessica Prettyman, who isn’t even a client, have used the restroom at Dunkin’ Donuts instead? The three women have walked from the entrance gallery into the living room now, with its soaring ceiling and lovely view of the Central Park Reservoir—Kate’s favorite view in all of the city. And from another window that offers a southern view, you can see all the way down to the Chrysler Building. Pointing this out to Allison and Jessica, and then leaving them behind for a minute or two, Kate makes her way into the kitchen, where brokers from other firms—ten people, mostly women—are clustered around a table loaded with pinwheel sandwiches and bottles of Diet Coke, seltzer, and club soda, courtesy (coincidentally, because it was not a Chase Residential listing) of the Chase dream team from MetLife mortgage bankers Mark Wenitzky, Bryan Siegel, and Andrew Texeira, whom the girls call Sexy Texy, thanks to a hot fling he had with their friend Robin Dolch in college at the University of Virginia. (A few years later, Andrew did Robin’s mortgage for an apartment she bought through Kate and Isabel after two years of searching for one with hallways. Robin had lived in postwar rentals with popcorn ceilings year after year while waiting for a prewar with just the right number of hallways. According to Robin, a good hallway separating the entrance from the living room, the living room from the bedrooms, was all that mattered. The girls had lovingly nicknamed her “The Girl Who Had to Have Hallways.”) In a small room off to the side, Kate catches a glimpse of a dark-haired, uniformed housekeeper sitting on a cot and watching The Price Is Right on a small TV set positioned on a ladder-back chair.
Hot Property Page 6